shuffle!

For this project, our team took on the re-creation of Shuffle! シャッフル!

Shaffuru! in order to make it more accessible as a Steam game. Originally developed by Navel in 2004, Shuffle! is a visual novel that follows the life of a seventeen-year-old boy named Rin Tsuchimi. The majority of the game revolves around the social and love life of Tsuchimi, who happens to be of romantic interest to several female characters.

The player indulges in the fantasy world of Shuffle! as they learn about different character storylines and decide Tsuchimi’s path through multiple-choice responses. The game concludes as the player finds out who the boy has fallen in love with. Featuring an anime art style of still and live-action scenes, the player is sure to enjoy the fusion of novel and game-play. Shuffle! is widely renowned and has sold over 200,000 copies.

Challenges

Shuffle! could only be played on PS2 upon release, and for many years after. But, as Japanese visual novels began to receive more of a global audience, our client decided to enlist our game development team in creating a version on Steam. By localizing the PS2 version and re-creating it as a Steam game, Shuffle!’s reach extended to a broader audience.

The main challenge for this project was rewriting the game in Unity 3D from a custom programming language in the PS2 version. First, our team had to access the graphic assets and source code. Then, we tackled the challenge of recreating Shuffle! using the Unity engine in as little time as possible.

Approach

Luckily, even though the PS2 version was written in a custom programming language, the animations and effects to convert were minimal. Our game development team analyzed existing source code to pin down exact character positions, sound effects, and the dialogue data of each screen, which were hard-coded in the source code.

Since we already had all the necessary screen data hard-coded within the old scripts of the PS2 source code, we found that the best approach would be to copy that data into the Unity 3D side. To do that, we wrote a custom program to read the PS2 source code and generate a JSON file.

Converting to a JSON file format created more ease within the workflow because it is a human-readable medium. With the JSON file format, we were able to easily change any part of the file throughout development. Once our team finished and was happy with the result, we ensured that all of our hard work was secure and memory-efficient by converting the data before shipping the game.